Popular Stories

Local Real Estate

Subscribe Now

IF you think it is a bit rough for Anderleigh residents having to drive on an unmade bush track to get to and from their homes, you should have a look at the road.

Anderleigh Rd was a lot worse than the tracks vehicles had made alongside it, to avoid the corrugations, one resident said yesterday.

Way out west a long time ago, such improvised road "improvements" were not unusual, with even major outback highways sometimes having a smoother unmade track running parallel to the corrugated gazetted road.

And while residents were accustomed to neglect in the days when they were in the "no man's land" near the border between the then Cooloola and Tiaro shires, most expected an improvement now that they are well inside the boundaries of the amalgamated Gympie Regional Council.

But their hopes are not being fulfilled just lately.

The short stretch of gravel near Ms Williams' home is a real kidney rattler, to say nothing of its effect on tyres, suspension and vehicle structure generally.

"I've just had the shock absorbers replaced on my 4WD," Roberts Rd resident Liz Williams told The Gympie Times yesterday.

Ms Williams says the gravel road surface is rapidly worsening as it crumbles under the combined effects of extremely dry weather and fairly constant vehicle wear and tear.

"It just wrecks cars," Ms Williams said.

The road, which leads from near Gunalda through to Tin Can Bay Rd, is normally in better shape these days, but had deteriorated markedly in the prevailing conditions, she said.

Council engineers are understood to be praying for just the right amount of rain to enable them to grade a lengthening list of rural roads, too dry to grade without a lot of expensively carried water to prevent the work making things worse on the already loose and guttered road surface.